Our Gods and Goddesses lead us out of the region for a reason and to Northern Europe, why?

To save us from famine, war; to preserve our ancestors and their culture from what?

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One possibility is to prevent them from being conquered by the rising empire civilizations of the middle East.

For most of Europe's history it was nearly impossible to conquer and hold any of it, because it was so hilly and forested that a marching army was easily ambushed. The people could live in smaller communities, un-dominated.

Then the Romans came along with their roads. Ostensibly the purpose of the roads was trade, but more likely the real purpose was to ensure their armies could move swiftly and forcibly to put down any insurrection.

Regarding the gods, remember that all Odinists say that the Eddas preserve information about the gods in the purest form.

We may identify Odin with another god, but we believe those other pantheons contain only corrupt versions of our legends.

I will read Greek mythology, but I do not view it as reliable resource to understand our gods.

I agree to this as with our heritage we have not had it told time and time again by thousands of people over thousands of years. it is possible that the greek/roman gods are our gods in a sense of storytelling that has been altered and warped over time to fit the current culture of that era. that being said, their gods may be ours but ours are surely not theirs. of all the legends as they go, ours I feel is the least faded by story tellers.

The original Greeks an Romans had Nordic leaders and with them seems to have been our lore. My opinion is that they had our lore but separation led to distortion. The Norse version of our lore is most correct in my opinion.

I've heard that Tyre was associated with Mars, so I'm just thinking maybe some of the other Gods had planets associated with them in the lore.

Maybe Odin's planet was Mercury? (Hermes being Mercury to the Romans). Do you think the correlation might be that simple? The Odinists pointed at the planet Mercury in the night sky and said it had something to do with Odin, so the Romans just assumed the rest?

On the other hand, Hermes is highly associated with secret knowledge (Hermetic Magick... etc....) It is quite in keeping with Odin's pursuits also.

I agree completely. There are lessons and insights to learn, but it is easy to get caught up on other faiths and attempting to link too much together. We are talking about two very different cultures. Our people travel. They have always been hunters and explorers first. Even if some settled, the majority of us kept moving. As they made those trips or reached those new lands, they told their stories and shared with others.

What do we see cited most often? It is not the words of the rural person or the nomad. Those stories were alive and active, yet they remained spoken and unwritten. What you see are the stories of farmers and sedentary people. They had plenty of time sitting around and not enough living in the rest of the world. All they could possibly know of the gods is what someone passing through the village told them, so this is the half story that we find in such places.

Consider those mega cults and faiths as Hollywood is now. Does it paint the most ideal and true story of the events or life that it conveys? It is meant for the masses and to entertain. The basis of these things hold little weight in the real situations that are depicted, just as the gods of such cultures became those hollow icons.

Reading through the posts, the message I understand from this is that the Norse Pantheon gods are the original gods, and the gods of the Greeks, Romans, Celts etc are variations on the Norse mythologies told to those travelers who passed through the Norse region before settling in their ultimate lands or from the stories that were told by traveling bards or scops through the foreign lands of these peoples.

OB has stated on more than one occasion, our gods and mythology is the purest. Therefore, to speculate that Odin is like Hermes or Mercury is incorrect. To be correct would be to say that Hermes and Mercury emulate Odin. Yes, it is all in the wording, but that wording is extremely important.

OB, please correct me if I have this wrong?

To try to understand why our gods and people traveled to Northern Europe can only ever be speculation on our part, and as I am no historian, and I doubt there is an historian alive who has the answer, we can only surmise what we find sits properly with our thinking - for me, perhaps it is that our gods saw impurity, greed, spite begin to seep into the populace and therefore chose to move those that wanted to go with them - this doesn't make them 'chosen people'. Or, it could have been completely based on weather patterns! Who is to say that they did not want to live in a hot / desert clime where they would become fat and lazy but chose to move to where they would be challenged.

We think on gods on a attempt to connect with large powers and imagination is always a important tool on this process. Usually imagination also define rules.

I also believe the norse gods are unique in different ways, while most aspects of the magic are bound to rules I personally believe that some norse gods have far more flexibility to be above all that... Odin for instance.

For the helenic gods, I dont know... I never had any experience or a deep study on their meaning. But OMHO Hinduism and the Egypt gods are not a corrupt version of our gods, their lore walks around a very different aspect of spirituality... They are complex and offers too many different insights on spirituality to be just a fake shadow.

Yet, when we make comparisson between them it will really offers some interesting thoughts. We can always learn a lot with different points of view.

Would you see Loki as Shiva? Shiva is also the fearful one, he is fire, chaos and destruction and he is also "father" of monstruosities... But he is also a great sage, a stern but benevolent lord that is kind of those who need. While most see them as very different personalities there is a lot of things that you may find on common... Like if they are just one....I could talk about Shiva and Loki for hours...